Great Andamanese People

Great Andamanese People

Great Andamanese (Hindi: अण्डमानी Aṇḍamāmā in Hindi) is a collective term used to refer to related indigenous peoples who lived throughout most of the Great Andaman archipelago, the main group of islands in the Andaman Islands; and also to their present-day descendants, living since 1970 on Strait Island.

The Great Andamanese were originally divided into ten major tribes, with distinct but closely related languages comprising one of the two identified families of indigenous Andamanese languages, the Great Andamanese family.

The Great Andamanese were clearly related to the other four major indigenous groups in the Andaman islands, but were well separated from them by culture and geography. The languages of those other four groups were only distantly related to those of the Great Andamanese and mutually unintelligible; they are classified in a separate family, the Ongan languages.

Once the most numerous of the five major groups in the Andaman Islands, with an estimated population between 2,000 and 6,600 the Great Andamanese were heavily decimated by diseases, alcohol, colonial warfare and loss of hunting territory. Only 52 remained as of February 2010, and the tribal and lingusitic distinctions have largely disappeared, so they may now considered a single Great Andamanese ethnic group with mixed Burmese, Hindi and aboriginal descent.